Social Explorer's Origins at CUNY

The following article, published in CUNY Matters in February 2007, profiles Andy and the Queens College team behind Social Explorer – including co-founder Ahmed Lacevic – from its earliest roots in the 1990s through its emergence as a widely used educational and research tool.

Andy is shown here at a pivotal moment in the project's development – having already attracted millions of users, roughly $3 million in grants and contracts, and adoption by universities across the country, while continuing to expand the site's reach back through two centuries of U.S. Census data.

The piece captures both the technical ambition of the Social Explorer project and the civic spirit behind it: Andy's deep conviction that making demographic data accessible and visual could help ordinary people – and especially his own students – better understand the world they lived in.